Articles in this section

By choosing an ‘easier’ cause to fight for, some Israelis have decided they can have it all. By showing compassion to animals and their suffering, we can live with the continued blindness to the pain of the humans among us.
Israelis have taken to vegetarianism and veganism perhaps more than any (...)

As the Zionist left struggles to stay relevant, some members of Meretz are proposing a new way forward.
Top members of the Zionist left-wing Meretz party are trying to transform their party into one based on full Jewish-Arab partnership, just a month after it passed the election threshold (...)

Ahmad Tibi, a long-standing Arab member of the Knesset, once remarked that ‘Israel is democratic towards Jews, and Jewish towards Arabs.’ For many years, that soundbite nicely captured the contradictions of ‘Jewish democracy’: fair elections, press freedom, cantankerous debate and due process for (...)

DWRC denounces violations of freedom of association and the right to organize of public sector employees by the Palestinian Authority, and calls for international solidarity.
Media Release, 9 November 2014
The Democracy and Workers’ Rights Center in Palestine condemns the detention of (...)

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Twelve, 304 pp., $26.99
The Israeli Economy from the Foundation of the State through the 21st Century, by Paul Rivlin, Cambridge University Press, 288 pp., $90.00; $31.99 (paper)
The Political Economy of (...)

Less than a year ago, the whole Arab region, from Tunisia in the West to Yemen in the Southeast, was the arena of a gigantic and extraordinary popular uprising for freedom and democracy.
The decades-old dictatorships of Hosni Mubarak and Zine el Abidine Ben Ali were thrown out in a matter of (...)

Israeli State: Five questions to Michel Warschawski. This interview about the social movement in Israel with journalist and author Michel Warschawski was conducted on August 11. International Viewpoint: For several weeks now a large-scale social movement has been demanding “social justice”. Do (...)

Israeli social protests reached critical mass on Saturday when hundreds of thousands took to the streets in cites throughout Israel for affordable housing prices, higher wages and better standards of living. But despite their legitimate claims, the protests convey a chaotic message that remains (...)

300,000 is a dizzying number. It was thrilling to see so many citizens on the streets suffused with hope. But I still grapple with uncertainty amid all the excitement, unsure of what connects me to them to make an ‘us.’ Beyond some increasingly specific policy demands, in the big scheme, are we (...)

Saturday night was the test Israel’s protest movement needed to show that social justice can and should be stronger than fear. Around 450,000 people took to the streets in Tel Aviv and throughout Israel to demand a real change from the neoliberal policies imposed by successive governments over (...)

My friend Boaz Gaon wrote a beautiful longing prayer for the day after the citizen uprising around the country, outlining a progressive’s fantasy (posted on the Hebrew women-issues web-zine Saloona). In his day-after scenario, cultural and intellectual professions will earn dignified salaries, (...)

For the first few weeks of the housing-cum-social protests in Israel, nothing else seemed to matter. For at least a week or two after the “J14” protests began (on July 14, in Tel Aviv), the press happily let it muscle out everything else – Palestinians, Iran, September, democracy barely reached (...)

Occupied Palestine, April 15th, 2011 – The Palestinian trade union movement, as a key component of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC), salutes the Scottish Congress of Trade Unions for their principled and historic decision in April 2009 to heed the Palestinian civil (...)

On a lovely autumn day in late October I landed in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Mellow sunshine bathed the town in a warm glow. I was back there after five years and I saw signs of change all around – in the spruced up new houses, in the ATM (...)

MANILA, Philippines—Since around Israeli aircraft dropped some 100 bombs on the Gaza Strip in December last year, less than a hundred Filipinos have come home, mostly wives and children of Palestinian residents.
No caregivers have come home from Israel.
Even during the bombing of Lebanon in (...)

Contribution at the international seminar held at the International Institute of Research and Education (IIRE, Amsterdam) on Palestine. This is a personal report on my relations with new Independent Democratic trade union movement in Palestine.
I first went to Palestine, in solidarity, in (...)